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Mobile SERP survival: Technical SEO checklist

A responsive website is not enough to survive in the mobile-first indexing era, says contributor Barry Adams. Here's a list of technical SEO and general optimization aspects you need to be aware of and fix on your site if necessary.

Barry Adams on June 5, 2018 at 3:04 pm

It’s taken over a year and a half, but Google’s mobile-first indexing is finally here.

The Search Console messages have begun to appear, and sites are steadily being switched over to the mobile-first indexing approach.

A lot has been written about mobile-first indexing, but most of the attention has focused on the basic aspects of mobile search engine optimization. In this article, I want to dig into some of the more technical aspects of mobile search engine optimization (SEO) and show what you can do to ensure your website is fully ready and will survive the mobile-first indexing era.

Mobile-first indexing

What does Google mean by “mobile-first indexing?”Contrary to what some SEOs believe, Google is not creating a separate index for mobile search. Whether a site is part of the mobile-first indexing approach or not, Google still serves its search results from the same index of the web.

At its core, only one thing really changes: Instead of crawling websites with a desktop user-agent, Google will crawl websites with a mobile user-agent.

Historically, Google has crawled websites from a desktop perspective, with a user-agent string that indicates a desktop device:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

With mobile-first indexing, this changes to a user-agent indicating a mobile device:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

This user-agent string shows that it’s purporting to be an Android device, so it expects to see your website’s content optimized for mobile viewing on that type of device.

Delivering mobile-optimized experiences

With this mobile user-agent, what Googlebot sees depends on how your website is configured to handle mobile users. Delivering mobile-optimized experiences tends to happen in one of three ways:

Responsive design. With this approach, nothing really changes. Your website’s uniform resource locators (URLs) remain the same, and the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) code served is identical as well. The site’s design will adapt to the size of the screen it’s being shown on, delivering a mobile experience catered to the device’s specific screen resolution. Google recommends responsive design…

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Barry Adams

Barry Adams, Founder of Polemic Digital, is an award-winning SEO consultant specializing in technical SEO for news publishers and e-commerce websites. He's been active in SEO since 1998 and has worked with a wide range of clients from micro-businesses to the world's largest media companies. Barry enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with the industry; he regularly speaks at digital conferences around the world, delivers annual guest lectures for several universities, and is the chief editor at popular European marketing blog State of Digital.